Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Back Again and There: Wrapping Our Middle Earth Campaign

On Sunday we wrapped our 28th and final session
of our Middle Earth campaign. We’d begun at the start of 2016, aiming for 26
sessions bi-weekly in one year. I knew we’d lose a few games, but it ended up
pushed back even further than I expected due to scheduling clashes, illnesses,
and the general trauma of being adults. The ending felt at once awesome and
bittersweet. Despite our session gaps especially towards the end, it finished
coherently and with emotional impact.

But we also finished the campaign down one player. This
group has been gaming on alternate Sundays continuously since 1995. We have four
players who’ve been there since the start. One of those had to drop, as he’s
relocated for work. I’d really hoped to have him present for the final session,
but his last week was the game before. The timing could have been better.

I posted a little on
the campaign when it first began. You can see some of the system
material here. The short version is that we used Action Cards again, our homebrew heavily influenced by Fate. I redrafted the mechanics to give
us “archetypes” with niche protection (Wizard, Thief, Animist, Ranger, Bard,
Envoy, and Warrior). We got all but the last two classes to the table. Overall some
things worked and some didn’t with the campaign.

SETTING

I gave the players a choice between the time period of The One Ring rpg (between The Hobbit & Fellowship of the Ring) and that of Icon Crown’s Middle Earth RPG (so 1640 in the Third
Age). They chose the latter. If they’d gone with the former, I’d have just run
TOR rather than hacking Action Cards.
The extra work was worth it because I like this time period and the ICE
sourcebooks for it are particularly awesome. The line has some garbage and the
art shifts weirdly between editions, but it’s generally good. You can see why used
copies sell for a lot these days.

That time period gives interesting choices, especially since
Sauron is in hiding. There’s darkness but to the people of Middle Earth that
consists of petty corruption and smaller dark foes. I chose Arthedain for my
campaign. It’s the last bastion of the great Dunedain Kingdoms remaining in the
North. It also the ruined lands the Hobbits travel through in Fellowship of the Ring. I liked being
able to show the world before it fell. Some things had already been lost- to
plague, to the Kin Strife, to an invasion by the Warlock. So Weathertop lay in
ruins, but that fall had happened within people’s memories. It gave extra
weight to these events.

MAGIC

Spellcraft’s always a question with a Middle Earth game. I
played MERP for many years and managed to get around the cognitive dissonance
of firebolt slinging elves in Gondor. The
One Ring takes the opposite approach. PCs don’t really have access to “magic”
as we’d think about it. They have some abilities reflecting the world, but they’re
not going to tomes or recopying spell books.

I aimed for a mid-point because I like magic in my fantasy.
I justified it with the timeline. Since our campaign took place in the past, I
imagined it came before magic had been reduced and ground away by centuries of
corruption, forgetting, and apathy. As it was, within the party we had only
three characters with access to magic. Among the NPCs and foes, only a few had
anything like spells. They more often dealt with supernatural foes than enemy
wizards.

That being said, I wasn’t that happy with the magic system.
The Bard class worked, with simple effects and changes based on performances.
That felt right. But the Wizard and Animst weren’t great. They were fun to play
and functioned in the context of this campaign. But that’s because I shifted
things on the fly.

The Wizard had open spell creation, with many possible
effects. Spell casting had costs: spending resources, not using the same effect
twice, requiring fictional justification for the spell. It worked with one
Wizard PC, but wouldn’t have with multiple Wizards in the party. I need to come
back to my perfect magic system in another post.

The Animist worked less well. I imagined it as something
between a Druid and a Craftsperson. As a result, the class lacked focus. More
importantly the system I’d created for Animist effects was too loose and
uncertain. I’d adapted some of the ritual magic ideas from the Dresden Files
Accelerated. But my version wasn’t clear, didn’t lay out cleanly what the Animist
could do, and had a lot of handwave-y parts. So our Animist, quite rightly,
didn’t engage with those mechanics that much. Instead they became a secondary
focus. If I wanted to do that again I’d make major changes. It’s worth noting
that the ritual magic in the final version of DFAE is fairly different from the
original, so they also saw problems.

TRAVEL

Ugh. As Sherri can attest, sometimes I fall in love with
mechanics that don’t work at the table. I dig the journey sub-system from The One Ring. It has cool options and
models the ‘long travel’ focus of the stories. TOR stresses time on the road,
strange incidents, uncertain meetings, and the dangers of the wild. They’re
evocative and cool rules. They also have a lot of book-keeping, granularity,
and rolling.

Or to be precise: more than our group usually has at the table.
Despite those complexities, I rewrote the rules pretty straight, adapting those
procedures to the skills and systems of our games. I made travel skills
important and added stunts related to those. For the first third or so of the campaign
I used those rules straight. They did what they intended: made journeys felt
like adventures and risky expeditions. But eventually that got boring and
tedious. I found that wasn’t the focus I or the group wanted. It was nice to
have at the start, but eventually I faded that to the back.

It comparable to how I used to run Vampire the Masquerade. At the start of the campaign, I spent time
on feeding and survival. How they hunted, the moral choices involved, the risks
it invited. But eventually I took it as a given they had that in hand and I moved
the game to other areas. I could still call back to those elements, but they
weren’t central to every session.

I still think The One
Ring’s journey mechanics are dynamite and I’ll probably borrow them for
one-off travel in the future. But they aren’t something I want to be juggling
regularly.

CLASSES AND MANTLES

The profession system generally worked. It meant players began
with a strong focus and got moving quickly. Essentially each one had unique
stunts and access to the higher level of their class skills. Other players
could still buy these, but they cost double- making them effectively off the
table until late in the campaign. I’d worked hard to balance the classes- giving
each one at least one common combat and action skill. I’ve run enough with the
system that I know which stunts players gravitate towards. I made sure I distributed
those especially attractive ones among the professions. I’m not always going to
use classes for Action Cards, but it
worked here.

I wish I’d seen the final version of Dresden Files Accelerated before created these rules. While I
borrowed some from DFAE, mantles weren’t as fully developed in the playtest
pack. I especially like the way the final version gives unique resources and
condition tracks. That’s something I would have adapted and it might have made
the magic and travel system stronger.

POLITICS

A little before the midpoint of the campaign, the players
travelled to a gathering of the nobles of Arthedain, including King Argleb. We
had several good sessions there, with them foiling the plots of a dark Bard and
agents of The Shadow. I’d taken the Arnor
supplement and done up material on the internal politics of the nation. We
had several families working at cross-purposes, ties to some of the PCs, and
various requests on the table.

While the players followed up on several of those threads
(the theft of items, plots against the King), that ended up being less important
in the final third of the game. I wish I’d found a way to call that back during
the conclusion. But we’d had so many breaks between sessions, I didn’t want to reincorporate
too many elements and distract from the tasks in front of the players. That’s
something I need to think about for the future: did I put too many plot threads
out there and could I have handled them better towards the end?

MECHANICS

(Inside Baseball
System Stuff for Action Cards. Skip as needed).

Costs: One of the
things I dig about PbtA is the clear line for “success with consequences.” Fate has that too, but often I forget
about in the heat of the moment. The same holds true for Action Cards. I really need to get better at that: framing
difficulty “as you need X to get it with a complication, Y to do it free and
clear.” To do that I also need to make changes to at least one of the base
cards, maybe more.

Damage: We used a
slightly different system for damage in this game. I lowered the # needed to do
damage, set a limit on the number of wound cards players could take, and had a
more restrictive healing system. It isn’t perfect, but I like the way that
feels now.

Points: We had a table
discussion a while back about advancement costs and power creep in Action Cards. At least one of the
players thinks we need hard caps on raising card results. I can see where he’s coming
from. I think Stunts are too cheap as they are right now; an accelerating cost
for them seems best solution. Maybe I can do the same with card results? Anyway
that likely means nothing to you-- the short version is I need to re-examine
the costs for buying things up with experience.

STAYING TOLKIEN

In the end, I dug the campaign. I’m proud of how we managed
to maintain the feel of LotR. I made a point of saying- “OK, that’s outside the
genre” when off-kilter things came up. We still went off on the usual tangents
and jokes, but we swung back to the table quickly. Because we’d been explicit up
front about what kind of game and feel we wanted, we could make that shift
easily. No one objected if someone X-Carded a particular line of conversation,
we just steered things back. Sometimes I’d call things out, “In another game we
might see X right now, but that material’s not in Tolkien’s world” – things like
extreme gore, strong romance, bodily functions, etc. That ended up becoming a
running joke, but one that helped reinforce the feel of the setting.